Bolt no free speech champion, just another rhetor*

Margo: I read with incredulity Andrew Bolt’s begging letter to citizens to donate to the IPA’s fund to defend free speech http://support.ipa.org.au/. IPA donors Murdoch and Gina could finance a free speech fund with their spare change. This appeal is about something else, changing the very meaning of free speech to suit the very big, very rich, very powerful end of town.

The Brandis free speech fantasy kicked off this week with a speech called The Freedom Wars and an @albericie interview. Brandis, describing Bolt as one of only two Australian journalists prepared to fight for free speech, set the scene for Bolt, Murdoch poster boy, to launch the IPA appeal. It is so cynical, and so arrogant, that it gives donors the chance to win a copy of the Daily Telegraph’s obscene propaganda page one splash during the media reform debate signed by its puppet master.

Free speech is not what Murdoch/Bolt/IPA are about, as the head of the Press Council Julian Disney explained in evidence to the Senate media reform inquiry (to my knowledge no newspaper reported his highly critical comments about their free speech failures).

Or maybe free speech is now what Murdoch, Bolt, the IPA, Brandis and Abbott say it is. Who is strong enough to seriously take them on in the public sphere?

I published my response to Brandis, then I tweeted a plea for writers to respond, and late last night got this tweet from @metaboleus 2.01 am.

https://twitter.com/metaboleus/status/332888011488493569

Onya, mate. Anyone else care to join him?

Free Speech is obviously a very important (if only implied) right, and no one can seriously argue it. There are limits on free speech; obviously you don’t have the right to shout fire in a crowded theatre when there’s no fire.

A recent limit to free speech, a sensible and timely one in my opinion, is restrictions on using ethnophaulisms in the public arena. I may out of touch, for never in my 50 years have I felt the need to publicly besmirch and mock our Aboriginal brothers and sisters. I have never felt the need to use the N-word in discourse, or to deny the existence of the holocaust.

Alleged political correctness allegedly gone mad barely registers as a threat to free speech compared to the almost complete full spectrum dominance of the major mainstream media companies, a dominance of interlocking companies and subsidiaries that seeps into the pores of society, and once established is as difficult to remove as the acres of lantana covering the Queensland country side.

In these free speech debates I am always amused to hear the bootless cries to heaven raised when people who hold powerful, privileged positions in society feel they are being restrained in their campaign of peddling misinformation. One these crying groups which make me chuckle is the IPA. I am equally amused to hear old white men such as Andrew Bolt, or Alan Jones, who work for influential media outlets, crying like aggrieved anarchists at the Stalinist regulations the government attempts to use to counteract the more egregious examples of rhetorical abuse.

Bolt is seen as a common sense hero in this one sided windmill tilting. He is romanticised to such an extent that he is seen by some as a martyr to free speech (a martyr who has not spent years in prison, who has not been blacklisted in his profession or denied work, who is free to travel around the country speaking at any time he wants). Thus the IPA’s Chris Berg compares Bolt with Socrates, the ugly, shoeless, poverty stricken, despiser of money and fame stone mason of Ancient Athens.

Socrates was famous for his humility and for his firm belief that he did not have wisdom. He can not be in any honest way be compared to Andrew Bolt. Andrew Bolt mixes with the richest, dresses in the height of fashion, seeks out new ways to make even more money, writes a regular column for the Murdoch press empire and has a weekly television show to broadcast his views.

In any comparison of Bolt and Socrates, Bolt would be one of the rhetors * that Socrates spent much of his time mocking and tangling in his dialectic web, exposing their ignorance and lack of knowledge.

To be fair to Andrew, he usually claims to have more common sense than wisdom, but one can easily counter that the closer one is to common sense the further one is from the truth. As a simple example we can safely say that common sense tells us the the sun revolves around the Earth. Common sense may be nice, and it may play to Bolt’s pseudo home spun deception, but in our modern knowledge based economy common sense is not enough, and the utterances of a journalist or commentator should be backed up with the most up to date and rigorous knowledge.

Many of the issues we face in our society concerning free speech and its meaning were current in the Athens of Socrates, and many of the same debates were argued and counter argued and mulled over. Socrates says in the Phaedrus:

An art of speaking then, composed by one, who, without a knowledge of the truth, has entrapped men’s opinions, will present, I conceive, but a sorry and inartistic appearance. (262c)

Mr Bolt’s conduct in the circumstances was at worst dishonest and misleading and at best, grossly careless. It reflects upon him as a journalist.

The judgement took Bolt to task, seeing him not, as Chris Berg suggests, a descendent of Socrates, but as a master of rhetoric, ‘a method of winning men’s souls by way of words…’ that Socrates was criticising (Phaedrus 261). The Popovic judgement is hardly a ringing Socratic endorsement of one who seeks knowledge of the truth.

Indeed if one is to voice ones opinion it would be best to check and double check all facts. It is important to be tentative, as truth is tentative and each new answer only leads to more questions. To have such a pulpit as Bolt one must be humble, as it is important to understand that no one person, or organisation has any sort of monopoly on truth and wisdom.

Conditions change, and sometimes conditions change quite rapidly often leaving the most confident commentator high, dry and embarrassed, although we are seeing the rise of journalists who seem to suffer embarrassment bypass.

One should never publish in the white heat of anger, emotion and indignation. In the same way that the harshly written letter to the bank manager should be viewed again in the cold light of morning before posting, so too should the commentator journalist sleep on their articles and their righteous anger. With the hierarchy of editor and sub editors and managing editors and all that goes with modern press reposting there should be this cooling off period and there should be no reason why a court should have to criticise a journalist as ‘at best, grossly careless.’

For free speech, if it is to be more than one sided rants or subjective opinion, needs to take a stance of scrupulously striving after truth. Free speech means being able and flexible and agile enough to see the error of ones own thoughts in the face of new evidence. One needs to be more than grossly careless. We have a ‘right’ to drive a car, but if we are grossly careless in using this right we run the risk of losing our licence.

Pericles, in his famous funeral oration, said ‘to be happy is to be free, and to be free is to be brave’. You are not and have no need to be brave if you have the power of multinational corporations behind you when you ‘dishonestly and misleadingly’ defame a magistrate.

Being brave is not lining up behind one of the main political parties to run a Protean campaign of shifting arguments against the opposing parties. Being brave is not wining and dining with some of the richest people in the country. As a thinker and former of opinion, being brave is daring to ‘speak truth to power.’ Being brave surely must mean standing side by side with the most marginalised and vulnerable in our society, and it must mean looking dispassionately at the evidence and being able to change your mind.

I see an attack on freedoms in this country. I see this attack as being an attack from both sides of parliament in ignoring and trivialising the cries of the heart in our heartless world.

I see very little of this attack manifesting itself in the stifling of the mainstream media and their near monopoly power in shaping public opinion.

I do see a series of yes men lining up to spew out clichés by the dozen to attack not only the government, but more importantly anything or anyone who stands in the way of their masters gaining even more power and wealth.

* ‘The rhetors and politicians merely flatter the demos, gratifying the citizens with pleasing words, as a cook gratifies the palate with pleasing food, in order to gain their favour and then their votes. Unlike the true politician or the doctor, the rhetor does not need to know anything, he only needs to seem to know, and just enough to be persuasive. Socratic dialectic, on the other hand, forces its participants to reflect on the nature and patterns of what they believe and do in order, not to persuade a mob, but to choose the good. Whereas rhetoric is given over to displays of verbal pyrotechnics as a means of concealing its ignorance, dialectic argues for the most important matters of justice in a singularly mundane fashion, which begins with familiar examples from everyday life—shoemakers, pastry cooks, and doctors.’

Comments

I’ve always found it laughable that the IPA – those great believers in the free market – beg for donations. I prefer to let the market decide if they should be funded.

I’m no wikileaks fanboy, but anyone who thinks the likes of Rupert Murdoch or Andrew Bolt are greater champions of free speech than Bradley Manning or Julian Assange, really needs to get some perspective.

It is bizarre that those very bastions of & passionate defenders of “free speech”, such as Bolt & Jones, are the very ones who shout down anyone who dares to disagree with them. Jones will only allow those who parrot his opinions, on all & sundry, to appear on his show, especially the callers.

This is another of those egregious dog whistles which many right wing commenters are fond of. Who doesn’t want freedom of speech? It’s a no-brainer. What is of concern is, it is only their version of free speech that they want. They want the right to defame, slander, misinform, lie, inflame, incite, pander to their heart’s content with the recipients of their bile having no rights of redress.

In short, if Bolt & the IPA are behind the push for so-called “free speech” then it is time to worry about our rights to same. There is nothing wrong with our current system, atm, apart from the fact Mr Bolt cannot defame at will, much to his displeasure.

Here is a reply from Thomas Connelly to the Chris Berg accusation above. Thomas had technical problems in posting this himself:.

Recently I wrote an essay in which I implied that Chris Berg compared Andrew Bolt to Socrates. Apparently Mr Berg took offence saying he has never compared Bolt and Socrates.

They say that you can not judge a book by it’s cover. I took the cover of Chris Berg’s book “In Defence of Free Speech. From Ancient Greece to Andrew Bolt” to assume that Chris Berg had compared Bolt to Socrates. And as Felix Unger taught me when one assumes they make an ass of u and me.

I was obviously sloppy in attempting to sketch an alternate Socratic shadow. The cover of the book in question is illustrated by the famous and appropriate painting, The Death of Socrates, by Jacques Louis David. A strange, romanticised version of aged Socrates. Socrates is in the act of taking the cup of hemlock. He is not the old man who, according to Xenophon, believed that the right time had come to die. Better to die now, Socrates was advised by his ‘daemon’, than to suffer the rigours of old age. The walls are clean, the prison itself is airy and well furnished. Socrates is fit and healthy, with the physique of an athlete. Above this heroic, romanticised image of Socrates is the name, in lurid green lettering, Andrew Bolt. Socrates appears to be gesturing to the name.

The point was not to critique Berg’s book, indeed I can not critique what I have not read. The point was to critique romantic ideals of Socrates that may or may not be true, and that Andrew Bolt was a defender of free speech. While it may be true that Chris Berg has never made the direct comparison, what is the naïve observer to think upon being confronted by this image in a book store, or at the local library? One can argue that this cover image of a virile, muscular and brave Socrates was outside the reach of the author. I am not published, so I am unsure of the procedure. But what is one to make of the subtitle ‘From Ancient Greece to Andrew Bolt?” Why not “From Ancient Greece to Now?” Surely the author must have input into this. One must ask why this was added? What was meant by adding this subtitle? Is a connection meant or implied?

So while one can argue, and possibly quite rightly too, that Berg never made the comparison; it seems that one could very easily argue the opposite point, and that the work was framed in such a way as to imply that there is a link from Socrates to Bolt. That link being that they are both Defenders of Free Speech, or that their right to free speech was curtailed, and must be defended.

I stand by my judgement that there is a connection being made, and reject any accusations of dishonesty. I may have been sloppy in wording, I may have drawn wrong inferences, if this is true then it is equally true that it is not dishonest to be mistaken.